Jacob Bender's Blog, page 4

Handbook of Research on Foreign Language Education in the Digital Age

Oh hey guys!  I recently copy-edited a forthcoming academic textbook entitled Handbook of Research on Foreign Language Education in the Digital Age , co-edited by CongCong Wang of the University of Northern Iowa and Lisa Winstead of California State University, Fullerton!  Many of the contributors were non-native English speakers, so my copy-editing often went far beyond the standard grammar checks; in fact, so extensive were certain of my edits that I am actually listed as third au...

Trump Is

Trump is Rorschach from The Watchmen, an unhinged sociopath shouting at his fellow inmates (i.e. the GOP) "You don't get it, do you! I'm not stuck in here with you, you're stuck in here with me!"

Trump is whom Cristopher Walken shakes hands with in The Dead Zone, then realizes he has a moral obligation to assassinate to prevent nuclear war.

Trump is who just barely lost election at the start of that one Ray Bradbury story, when a time travel safari heads back to the Jurassic to kill a T. Rex; b...

How I Met Your Mother

[A Sequel]
It was very important to her that he had asked her out first.  This was integral.

For he hadn't--in fact he hadn't needed to. Taking a risk, she had pulled up his number from customer records, and sent him a text inquiring as to whether John Adams and Thomas Jefferson were friends together again.

His car had overheated on his way to Moab you see, and he really needed this car to move him to the Midwest for grad school next month; he had told her this explicitly, for she was the o...

On My First Triathlon

Over a year ago, I bet Kristina that if she read The Brothers Karamazov, that I would run a triathlon.  Naturally, I assumed this meant I would never run a triathlon.  She finished it in 6 weeks.

Yesterday, I finally fulfilled my end of the bargain.  As I ran the TryByKnight Sprint Triathlon at Wartburg College in Waverly, IA.

My swim featured an embarrassing amount of backstroke, my biking had more than its fair share of coasting and fidgeting with the gears, and my 5k was scarc...

It's OK For Church To Be Boring Sometimes

Once in an interview, Slajov Zizek attempted to discuss the thesis of his new book through the example of a small child not wanting to visit Grandma, but his Dad just says "shut up, we're going"--that was the older model, said Zizek; now, in our more modern, "Enlightened" form of parenting, we tell the kid he doesn't have to go, it's his choice, but Grandma has been looking forward to seeing him for so long, and how terribly disappointed she'll be if he doesn't come. 

Though this newer ve...

On Art Actually Mattering

In Book X of Plato's Republic, Socrates, in describing his ideal Republic, calls for the complete removal of the poets, considering the lot of them to be charlatans, pale imitators of truth, and corrupters of public morals--"Notwithstanding this," he concludes, "let us
Over the past 2,400 years, Western poets have attempted to an...

The Epic and Audacious Adventures of the NAUTILUS! and Her Gallant Crew in the 19th Century, Part I: On the Relationships Betwixt the Egyptian Space Program and the Failures of European Imperialism

A few years ago, when I still lived in Salt Lake, my roommate David Harris (PhD Astrophysics, U. of Utah) and I were discussing the numerous failings of Star Trek: Voyager (and they were many!), and after listing the wooden acting, the caricatures masquerading as diversity, the contrived story-lines, and the utterly wasted conceit, we finally decided that the central failing of the show was that it fundamentally lacked a sense of wonder! 

Great guns, the show strands a star-ship on the f...

Andrew Bird in the Valleys of the Young

Last weekend Kristina and I drove down to St. Louis to see Andrew Bird perform at the Pageant.  What can I say?  The man is astounding live.  Kristina was initially lukewarm on going, only buying me tickets cause it was my birthday--but if anything she loved the show even more than me.  In an Indie and Pop music world so filled with rank amateurs, either proud of their "raw" lack of talent or auto-tuned to death--in our "Post-Skills" moment wherein mere novelty is privileg...

On Prince vs. the Internet

Between Bowie and Prince, 2016 has been a rough year for effeminate-masculine outré artiste-types--the Venn Diagram of those two fanbases overlaps much more than I realized.  Yet though David Bowie's death hit me far harder than I ever though it would, unlike many of my peers, I confess that Prince's passing initially left me somewhat detached.  All I could really remember of him was "1999", some lame Jay Leno monologues about "The Artist Formally Known As", and an off-hand Simpsons...

A Terrible Beauty Is Born

Today, Sunday April 24th, marks the exact centennial of the Easter Uprising in Ireland, the catalyst for the whole violent process that finally brought about the secession of the Republic of Ireland from the UK after seven long centuries of struggle.  It is also, incidentally, my birthday.

William Butler Yeats, Nobel laureate and Irish National poet, wrote a famous poem about it, "Easter 1916," that features the astounding couplet: "All is changed, changed utterly/A terrible beauty is bor...